Hi, does anybody know how to make berries for solidgrowth plants and populate them as an eco-instance. I tried but my "pear" (orginally made with wings3d, exported as obj and then imported and textured within vue) did not appear. ... or is there tutorial?

LOL - a pear did not appear!!!

Okay, thanks in advance!

;-)

Bernie

Save your pear as a vob.

Open your trunk or branch material in the editor and make it an ecosystem.  Add your pear and you need to set the density and scale sliders till you get the right amount.. You also need to unchck the 'decay near foreign objects' box

You also need to set it to populate below surface/proporional to size of instance and the slider for direction from surface needs to be all the way over to vertical.

Save that material, then save your tree.

You will have to manually populate the ecosystem after loading each tree

You can also use an eco on the foliage texture too but this is a little more complicated.

First open the foliage in the material editor, and then go to the simple material editor and click on the alpha youll see beside it there is a little black or white square with a circle in it , click on this then right click in the alpha pane and select copy material from the drop down that appears.

then click the little square again to restore the alpha so that it works proplerly as a trans map.

then click on the advanced material editor, and then check the ecosystem box.

go to the density and distrubution tab, and check the variable distribution box
then right clifk on the function pane in that box and select past.

set the density slider at top left to 100 percent

then you can go about importing the objects you want to poplulate the eco with, and at this point i would save the material and then apply it to the plant in the foliage section.

you may notiice that the prevue is a plant covered in what looks like sheets of paper, this is normal and when you render it shoudl sort its self out!!

As i said its complicated and some times takes a few goes to get it right but its definatly possible!